371–380 of 423 posts
The actual headline here is sort of misleading -- the 4x price increase is over the past 3 months!
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I sincerely hope that OpenAI goes down in flames with those DRAM contracts are going to the highest bidder then so probably Google or whatever AI competitor. Honestly having problems remembering the other AI companies without googling it. I recall MS, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Anthropic.
When OpenAI fails, all the AI projects everywhere else will also be killed. Such is the nature of bubbles. With any luck the farm land where the datacenters were built will be sold back to the farmers for half off and they get a free barn out of the deal.
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I’m glad you want that! But, most people wouldn’t. Also, electric seat adjustments give you way more options than the manual adjustments could. And typically with more precision than the under seat bar with discrete positions.
> But, most people wouldn't. How do you know?
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The high prices ("price gouging") perform a social function because some cannot afford it; they prioritize what matters to them more, and ram is left available to those who absolutely require it. Trying to get around that by forcing prices below the market price simple encourages scalping behaviors. If prices are below the market price, but at the market price you would prefer the cash in your pocket over the ram sti…
> The high prices ("price gouging") perform a social function because some cannot afford it; they prioritize what matters to them more, and ram is left available to those who absolutely require it. This is not true at all. It isn't left available to those who absolutely need it but to those who can pay for it. Those are two very different things.
These two exchanges are not disconnected either: phone prices are affected by revenues of companies which use ram for production. And those revenues are determined by purchases of phones. The person demonstrates through their choice that the use of ram for an indirect purpose of making phones (however indirectly that might effect it) is more valuable to them than the direct use in their computer. The person is not excluded from "having" the ram in the most general sense: they have it indirectly because they benefit from its use in production whose products they value more than the direct use of ram. The person, along with all other consumers, participates in organizing production in the manner that best benefits them, according to their needs, which may not necessarily involve them directly owning the thing.
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Most people have phones that can handle webpages with 1-5MB JS bundles. Why artificially limit what you can do on the web? Why limit ourselves to 1GB RAM when more resources means tech becomes more useful? Returning to simple webpages is popular idea on HN but it’s like wanting a car with no backup camera and crank windows. If your goal is to have your car be as simple as possible, then sure, but that’s not the case…
I’d argue that in many of these instances, less is far more. I want my car to just be really good at being a car, reliably get me from A to B. A Bluetooth connection to the stereo system is nice, but I don’t need a freaking 20” phablet right next to my face when I’m driving. When I go to a website, I’m usually looking for information, to read something. I don’t often want fancy scroll and animations, I just want clea…
Animations and etc. that distract from the actual content are superfluous. Agreed! I hate it when sites scrolljack.
But lots of HN posters want to impose the same austerity on every website, regardless of whether it’s appropriate. You can’t build Linear in 100KB of JS. Nor would you want to run it on 1 GB RAM. And that’s the case for a lot of economically useful applications.
Keeping things as simple as possible shouldn’t be the goal. It should be keeping it simple enough for the use case at hand.
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I do like the old JS Gmail UI. But the current JS Gmail UI doesn’t feel any slower. It is cluttered with more features, but some of them I find useful. (Displaying my calendar and being able to accept invites right in Gmail being a big one.)
It absolutely is slower. To an extreme degree even. It takes 10 to 20 seconds to load and is incredibly sluggish to use on some low-end machines I use regularly.
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My point was not to litigate the precise method of e-waste disposal.
Your point was to post nonsense without caring about whether it was true or false in order to troll someone into responding. Please don't do that again.
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Knowingly attempting to buy or sell in quantities likely to move markets, for direct profit, is called manipulation and is most definitely illegal. this is true in physical markets commodity markets and financial markets. Not saying that this is what openAI is doing but it definitely merits an investigation.
It's illegal if you're trying to make prices higher, but it's completely legal and normal if you actually want the RAM. Before you buy anything from a store, do you also show them all your receipts from the other stores you visited today?
That's exactly the goal, to raise prices for OpenAI's competitors.
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Scarcity is a function of demand. That doesn't change the importance of what I said! In fact, it proves my point. The reason that "some rich bastard" is willing to pay such prices for gpus or ram or anything else is because they expect it to generate revenue for them equal to or greater than the amount they paid for it. How do they generate revenue? By selling a product! Who do they sell the product to? People like y…
Your logic that OpenAI can by proxy afford to buy out the entire world's supply of RAM because consumers value OpenAI products more than other RAM-dependent things assumes that OpenAI's money comes from selling goods or services to those consumers. It doesn't. The overwhelming majority of people pay zero dollars per year on AI services, while almost everyone spends at least a few hundred a year on gadgets that need R…